Trump’s Call to Arm Teachers Is Kind of Dumb

President Donald Trump participates in a discussion that included survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting, at the White House in Washington, Feb. 21, 2018. “We’re going to do something about this horrible situation,” Trump said at the event's outset, adding that his administration would be “very strong on background checks.” (Tom Brenner/Copyright 2018 The New York Times)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against guns in schools. Making our nation’s K-12 schools and campuses “gun free zones” don’t make them safer. They make them targets. I’d allow concealed carry on school property. I’m also not against local legislatures and school districts deciding they might want some personnel – teachers, administrators, staff, etc. – to go armed.

That should be a local decision, however. Not all school personnel are going to want the responsibility of being armed. Not all parents are going to be comfortable with armed janitors or principals. In some districts officials may be able to provide the funding for full-time security guards or police officers anyway.

To the extent that guns in schools should be a national, or even statewide, debate it should focus on allowing those decisions to be made locally. It should be an option for schools, not an imposition.

The truth is that the police aren’t omnipresent, and laws only work on people willing to follow them. What really keeps us safe in society is the fact that most of us are good people not inclined to hurt or murder or steal from one another.

In the wake of tragedies such as the mass shooting in Florida we need to be careful not to overreact. The media like to make a spectacle out of these things – the CNN town hall last night featuring survivors from Parkland High was utter garbage – which has ugly two-pronged consequences for American society.

Most people who use a gun to hurt someone in America use it to hurt themselves. And while thousands of Americans are killed each year in non-suicide gun violence, only a tiny fraction of that total are people killed in mass shootings. Most of those deaths result from things like gang violence or plain old homicide.

My point is that I don’t want to make our schools feel like prisons, I don’t want to turn our society into a paranoid police state, because a series of tragic but still relatively rare incidents.

In 2007 author David Foster Wallace asked a provocative question in a column for The Atlantic which I think is relevant in this debate (though Wallace was writing about terrorism). “[W]hat if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?”

We often think of ourselves as protected by laws and law enforcement. The truth is that the police aren’t omnipresent, and laws only work on people willing to follow them. What really keeps us safe in society is the fact that most of us are good people not inclined to hurt or murder or steal from one another.

We can always pass more laws, and pay for more law enforcement, but we will never be 100 percent safe from random monsters bent on mayhem.